Combat!http://combatblog.net
A blog by Dan BrooksWed, 16 Aug 2017 21:07:42 +0000en-UShourly1https://wordpress.org/?v=4.8.1I am old nowhttp://combatblog.net/i-am-old-now/
http://combatblog.net/i-am-old-now/#commentsWed, 16 Aug 2017 21:06:57 +0000http://combatblog.net/?p=10861Today is my birthday, and I think I can say with confidence that this is the oldest I have ever been. There were a couple years in my late twenties when I wrote obsessively about subway etiquette like a septuagenarian, but now I am even more crotchety than that. I feel good, though. Ongoing physical […]

Today is my birthday, and I think I can say with confidence that this is the oldest I have ever been. There were a couple years in my late twenties when I wrote obsessively about subway etiquette like a septuagenarian, but now I am even more crotchety than that. I feel good, though. Ongoing physical therapy notwithstanding, I am probably in the best shape of my life. I am engaged to be married, which is a young person’s game, and I have the judgment of a man half my age. Such a man would still be able to buy cigarettes, which is sobering, but I suppose my continued aging is pretty good when I consider the alternative. It is better to be young, but it is best to live. I have lived about half of what a modern person can reasonably expect, and it feels all right. I think I will keep doing it.

I am hereby putting Combat! blog on hiatus until Monday, August 28th. It’s a logistical choice, not an emotional one. My brother and The Cure are here in Missoula even as we speak, and several other good friends will arrive in the coming days to observe my birthday this weekend. On Monday, we are traveling to see the eclipse. On Tuesday, I fly to New York on assignment, and the rest of the week will be consumed with reportage. These are all excellent conflicts to have, and my only regret is that they will deprive you, the gentle reader, of my arbitrary and sometimes destructive opinions. Probably you could stand a break from me, though. In the meantime, how about you watch this amazing Vice segment on the violence in Charlottesville? Spoiler alert: It will make you think that white nationalists are dicks. I’ll see you in 12 days.

]]>http://combatblog.net/i-am-old-now/feed/1Why is there a Confederate monument in Helena, Montana?http://combatblog.net/why-is-there-a-confederate-monument-in-helena-montana/
http://combatblog.net/why-is-there-a-confederate-monument-in-helena-montana/#commentsTue, 15 Aug 2017 19:13:42 +0000http://combatblog.net/?p=10854The state of Montana did not participate in the US civil war. Montana didn’t become a state until decades later, in 1889, and even then it was about as far north of the Mason-Dixon line as states get. Although somebody in the Montana territory probably traveled south to fight on the side of the Confederacy, […]

The state of Montana did not participate in the US civil war. Montana didn’t become a state until decades later, in 1889, and even then it was about as far north of the Mason-Dixon line as states get. Although somebody in the Montana territory probably traveled south to fight on the side of the Confederacy, the war is only a part of this region’s history indirectly, in the same way as, say, the Boston Tea Party. There’s no statue of Sam Adams in Helena. Yet there is a memorial to Confederate soldiers, given to the city by The Daughters of the Confederacy in 1915.

In a letter to city commissioners, eight members of the state legislature’s American Indian Caucus recently asked that the fountain be removed. Helena Mayor Jim Smith opposes this idea. In his own letter, reported by Holly Michels in the Helena Independent-Record, he writes, “Fundamentally, I believe we ought to be very careful before we start obliterating history. That is what totalitarian regimes do.”

Let’s talk about what constitutes history, then. The notion that statues and fountains somehow stand between us and the “obliteration” of history is fatuous. I defy you to show me someone who only knows about the Civil War from a statue. And what information about history does the fountain in Hill Park convey? If you did not know anything about the past, all this monument would tell you is that there once existed a group called The Daughters of the Confederacy, and it dedicated a fountain in 1915.

That fountain is less a piece of history than a monument to one group’s understanding of it. The distinction is important. The D of the C built this monument 50 years after the Civil War ended. That’s an astonishingly short time, like erecting a monument to the Wehrmacht in Paris in 1995. But it is still two generations after the Confederacy ceased to exist, and the fountain cannot meaningfully be called a relic of Civil War history. Instead, it is a monument to the City of Helena’s endorsement of the Daughters of the Confederacy in 1915.

That moment is also part of history, but it is not important in the same way as the Civil War. I don’t think anyone considers it a significant part of the story of Helena. It has purely symbolic importance, and what it symbolizes—then and now—is not something the city should support, even if only by inaction.

The Daughters of the Confederacy was founded to sponsor burials of Confederate veterans, erect monuments to them, and influence schools to teach Civil War history in ways that reflected favorably on the South. Its membership increased dramatically during the first two decades of the 20th century, going from 17,000 in 1900 to almost 100,000 by the outbreak of World War I. The fountain in Hill Park reflects the height of the Daughters’ influence. It also reflects a sympathy to their cause completely divorced from history.

Again, Montana played no part in the Civil War. If it had existed as a state, it would have almost certainly fought for the North. It had no historical ties to the Confederacy, in 1863 or in 1915. The fountain therefore suggests an affinity for some other aspect of the Daughters’ mission. It is hard to say what that could be other than white supremacy.

Many historians, including Princeton professor and Pulitzer Prize winner James McPherson, consider the Daughters of the Confederacy a stalking horse for white supremacy. It’s not inconceivable that some of the Daughters are lineal descendants of Confederates who only want to memorialize their ancestors, but that argument breaks down in Montana. The further we get, geographically and chronologically, from the Confederacy itself, the more structures like this fountain become monuments to the idea and not the history.

That idea is repugnant. Confederate soldiers fought a war of treason against the United States in defense of slavery. There are a lot of good reasons to study that war and remember it, to literally memorialize the history. But there are only two reasons to memorialize the ideas: either you like the notion of exploiting and disenfranchising black people by force, or you like the notion of betraying the United States and killing its citizens.

There is a third reason, of course: you recognize that Confederate monuments have some vague appeal to disgruntled white people, and you’re pandering. I hope that’s what Mayor Smith is up to. I would hate to think he is a slavemonger or seditionist. He has probably just performed the same calculus the city fathers did in 1915. Most of Helena is white, and saying yes to some cracker nonsense will alienate fewer voters than saying no. The next step in this process, probably, is to prove him wrong.

]]>http://combatblog.net/why-is-there-a-confederate-monument-in-helena-montana/feed/3Should we get white nationalists fired from their jobs?http://combatblog.net/get-white-nationalists-fired-jobs/
http://combatblog.net/get-white-nationalists-fired-jobs/#commentsMon, 14 Aug 2017 22:36:59 +0000http://combatblog.net/?p=10850The thing about white nationalists is fuck them. Ordinary rules of civil society, such as “don’t persecute people for their beliefs,” break down as those beliefs approach fascism. We already tried responding to fascism with sanction and argument, and it ended baldy. This history puts fascism in a unique category of beliefs that might justify […]

Cole White, formerly of Top Dog, marches for whiteness in Charlottesville.

The thing about white nationalists is fuck them. Ordinary rules of civil society, such as “don’t persecute people for their beliefs,” break down as those beliefs approach fascism. We already tried responding to fascism with sanction and argument, and it ended baldy. This history puts fascism in a unique category of beliefs that might justify preemptive violence. If NAMBLA organized a march through downtown Missoula, I would oppose heading over there to beat them up. We have seen what happens when fascism gets rolling, however, and the way it seeks to make force superior to reason or democratic processes, in a way that might justify wielding force against fascism right off the bat.

I mention this because of the Unite the Right rally in Charlottesville, Virginia this weekend. It ended in violence and what appears to be a vehicular homicide. Even those marchers who did not show up with sticks and torches espoused an ideology antithetical to this country’s values. The white race is a fiction, in my opinion, but even if it were real, you cannot say one race is superior to or even just inherently different from others while simultaneously claiming that all people are created equal. Race nationalism is incompatible with American democracy. The people who believe in it are assholes, but are they Nazis?

This question should not be taken as a defense of any of the ideas expressed by what is called the alt-right. I’m not steeped in that culture, but literally everything I have heard from them has been stupid. Not everything I have heard from them has been what I would classify as Nazism, though. This distinction is important to me, because while I am comfortable with the idea of stomping Nazis for their beliefs, I am not comfortable with the idea of stomping someone because they believe, for example, that white people are inherently better at math.

That claim affronts me, and I would hold whoever said it in contempt. I would not persecute them, though. In most cases, that’s a distinction without difference. When you see some Richard Spencer type marching down the street with a club and shouting about Jews, by all means, knock him down. But what about when you see some asshole like Cole White, pictured at the top of this post? He marched in Charlottesville Friday night. The Twitter account Yes, You’re Racist identified him from a picture on Saturday, and by the end of the day he had been fired from his job at a libertarian hot dog restaurant.

Just desserts, right? That’s one white man who will have time to rethink his theories about which race is superior, now that he doesn’t spend all day preparing and selling hot dogs. I don’t feel too bad about what happened to Mr. White, but I don’t feel too good about the mechanism by which it came about. I have two concerns, one of them a lot more esoteric than the other. Both of them can be neatly encapsulated in one thought experiment:

Imagine you are a socialist, and you march in a public demonstration demanding that the United States nationalize its banking system. The Twitter account Yes, You’re a Communist calls your employer about it, and you lose your job at the libertarian hot dog place.

Imagine you are a socialist, and you see Cole White marching in a public demonstration demanding that Charlottesville preserve its monument to Robert E. Lee. You call his employer, and he loses his job at the libertarian hot dog place.

Scenario (1) is very much like what actually happened, except the political belief in question is not as unequivocally bad as racism. Some might even say it’s good. No one of sense would say that about white supremacy, but I can imagine someone of sense saying it about the preservation of Confederate statues. I’m against that. Tear ’em down. But I am not so against it that I believe anyone who disagrees with me should lose their job. This scenario raises questions about how bad a political belief has to be to justify attacking the person who holds it.

Scenario (2) raises questions about how we attack objectionable beliefs. The practice of getting people fired for saying stupid things on the internet is well-established. White was doing stupid things in real life, but he was fired by the same basic mechanism: people were disgusted with him, figured out who he was, and put pressure on his employer. If you believe, as I do, that capital in general and work in particular exercise too much influence on American lives, it’s hard to justify getting people fired as an instrument of political action. White is an asshole, but has he now lost his health insurance? If he gets leukemia next week, are we willing to deny him treatment because of his opinions on Robert E. Lee and so-called racial science?

Again, I’m not trying to drum up sympathy for this jerk. I am trying to ask what we are willing to do to the people for whom we have almost no sympathy at all. We should punch Nazis, but maybe we should refrain from punching people who merely resemble Nazis. Otherwise, the mechanisms of our disagreements might overpower their content. If you had a button on your desk that electrocuted anyone you disagreed with, you could solve the Nazi problem real quick. Maybe, though, you would generate a new problem entirely.

]]>http://combatblog.net/get-white-nationalists-fired-jobs/feed/7Friday links! Works of art editionhttp://combatblog.net/friday-links-works-of-art-edition/
http://combatblog.net/friday-links-works-of-art-edition/#respondFri, 11 Aug 2017 17:38:33 +0000http://combatblog.net/?p=10846Art has the power to change lives. It can redraw the boundaries of our public discourse and stretch the horizons of our private hearts. When you study its history and see the important role it has played in human development, you realize that art has the power to do anything, except make money. Mostly, though, […]

Art has the power to change lives. It can redraw the boundaries of our public discourse and stretch the horizons of our private hearts. When you study its history and see the important role it has played in human development, you realize that art has the power to do anything, except make money. Mostly, though, it has the power to suck. Back when art was two carvings a year and whatever Michelangelo put out, it had to be really good. Now that everyone is an artist and all behavior is performance, no single unit of art has to do much work. It just has to be seen. Today is Friday, and the world is producing art on a larger scale than ever before. Won’t you tactfully remark on the size of the canvas with me?

First, the good news: The C-Star, a ship that anti-immigration activists bought to keep refugees from reaching Europe, has been saved by a refugee rescue boat. The bad news is everyone is fine. A right-wing European group called Generation Identity commissioned the C-Star to investigate refugee rescue boats operating in the Mediterranean Sea, which a subset of YouTube users believe are secretly engaged in human trafficking. Last week, the C-Star suffered an engine failure off the coast of Libya. The nearest vessel was a cutter operated by Sea-Eye, one of the NGOs the C-Star had been tasked with stopping. Cheap European irony! This is why we have to resist the globalist agenda before it’s too late, and put our refugee/naval policy back in the charge of those who know best: YouTube power users.

The C-Star is a dumb idea, but at least it has a concrete purpose and a cause-and-effect plan to carry it out: commission ship, harass rescue boats, stop (i.e. drown) refugees. That’s the right-wing crackpot approach. Compare to the liberal approach: make gesture, publicize gesture, wait for power to admit it was wrong. On Wednesday, artist and filmmaker Taran Singh Brar inflated a giant, Trump-like chicken outside the White House. Get this: the chicken had big, gold hair! Trump would have been mortified if he saw that, which he did not, since he was still at his golf resort in New Jersey. But the important thing is that Brar made a statement. To wit:

Mr. Brar, 31, told USA Today that he wanted to make a statement about the president being a “weak and ineffective leader.” He added, “He’s too afraid to release his tax returns, too afraid to stand up to Vladimir Putin, and playing chicken with North Korea.”

Here’s a tip for the Kombat! Kids: If you want someone to stop playing chicken, do not accuse him of being weak and fearful. Brar applied for his permit months ago, and he couldn’t have known what world events would look like Wednesday. But we’re all grateful to him for taking the time, during this period of heightened tension between the US and North Korea, to call the president chicken.

The artist cannot be responsible for how his or her work is received. The artist merely creates, worrying about the consequences when they come. In completely unrelated news, half of Republican respondents to a recent Washington Post survey said they would support postponing the 2020 election until we could make sure only eligible citizens voted, if President Trump suggested it. That’s astonishing, at first. Then it makes one wonder how many respondents would support arming snowmen with automatic rifles if a pollster suggested it. We’ve talked about this issue before, but what people say they support in surveys is not what they support in public life. The American electorate gets crazier under questioning. Concepts far outside the Overton Window take on the appearance of pressing issues once you start polling people about them. Such is the pollster’s art, I suppose.

The secret to entertaining people is to give them something to get outraged about. Matt Pearce reminded me of the iconic “Host,” David Foster Wallace’s 2005 profile of the southern California talk-radio host John Ziegler. Lest you imagine the present decade is unusual, “Host” addresses a cluster of themes that sound awfully familiar: whether Ziegler and his listeners live in their own bubble of information, if he actually believes what he professes on air or if it’s all kayfabe, whether his audience understands it as such, et cetera. Granted, none of the stories Ziegler reports on his show are made up. But the panic over whether a large swath of the country has become simultaneously radicalized and disconnected from factual information is right there. Looks like everything old is new again. Either that or the election of a deranged reality TV star by self-radicalized internet shut-ins is the culmination of a process that’s been occurring for the last 12 years, and we’re not looking at a cycle so much as a metastasizing. Ha!

]]>http://combatblog.net/friday-links-works-of-art-edition/feed/0What makes it okay to deport Audemio Orozco-Ramirez?http://combatblog.net/billings-man-raped-jail-now-slated-deportation/
http://combatblog.net/billings-man-raped-jail-now-slated-deportation/#commentsThu, 10 Aug 2017 19:15:14 +0000http://combatblog.net/?p=10842In 2013, Audemio Orozco-Ramirez with the passenger in a traffic stop in Jefferson County, Montana. At that time, he had been living in the United States approximately 16 years. Orozco-Ramirez was born in Michoacan, Mexico. He has no criminal record, but the officer of the Jefferson County Sheriff’s department who stopped the car he was […]

In 2013, Audemio Orozco-Ramirez with the passenger in a traffic stop in Jefferson County, Montana. At that time, he had been living in the United States approximately 16 years. Orozco-Ramirez was born in Michoacan, Mexico. He has no criminal record, but the officer of the Jefferson County Sheriff’s department who stopped the car he was riding in suspected that he was in the country illegally, in part because he did not speak English. Orozco-Ramirez was arrested on a civil immigration violation and placed in a county jail sell with nine other men.

During a period of time that went missing from the jail’s otherwise continuous surveillance footage, a number of these men held down Orozco-Ramirez and raped him. In December, Jefferson County settled a federal lawsuit filed by Orozco-Ramirez for $125,000 without admitting that he was assaulted or it was liable. Since then, he has lived and worked outside Billings, checking in with Immigrations and Customs Enforcement agents on a monthly basis. During his last check-in, he was arrested and scheduled for deportation.

An appeals court judge has issued a stay against that decision pending a hearing. The feds frequently issue “U visas” to foreign nationals who are the victims of crimes and have aided authorities in their investigations, but in settling Orozco-Ramirez’s lawsuit, Jefferson County did not admit he was a victim of a crime. Legally, we can deport him. The question of whether we can do so ethically is more complicated.

Except for crossing the border illegally 20 years ago, Orozco-Ramirez has participated in the social contract. Our state and federal governments, on the other hand, have betrayed him multiple times. For example, there was the time we investigated him for civil violations as the passenger in a traffic stop. That doesn’t happen to Americans who enjoy constitutional rights. There was also the time we locked him in a cell full of rapists, also for a civil violation, and stopped watching what happened. Then there was the time we made a deal with him to forget about the rape thing and then picked him up for deportation while he was upholding his end of the bargain.

No American would agree that is the right way for a government to treat the people it governs. Yet because Orozco-Ramirez is not a citizen but merely a person who has lived here for the last 20 years, anything we do to him is fine. That’s a peculiar moral calculus, and you can read all about in this week’s column for the Missoula Independent. We’ll be back tomorrow with Friday links!

]]>http://combatblog.net/billings-man-raped-jail-now-slated-deportation/feed/1Donald Trump ad libbed his threat to North Koreahttp://combatblog.net/donald-trump-ad-libbed-threat-north-korea/
http://combatblog.net/donald-trump-ad-libbed-threat-north-korea/#respondWed, 09 Aug 2017 20:13:16 +0000http://combatblog.net/?p=10838Yesterday, while less effective people were working, Donald Trump was both working and vacationing at the same time. The president took a break from doing the people’s business at his Bedminster, NJ golf resort to issue this statement on North Korea: North Korea best not make any more threats to the United States. They will […]

Yesterday, while less effective people were working, Donald Trump was both working and vacationing at the same time. The president took a break from doing the people’s business at his Bedminster, NJ golf resort to issue this statement on North Korea:

North Korea best not make any more threats to the United States. They will be met with fire and fury like the world has never seen. He has been very threatening, beyond a normal state, and as I said they will be met with fire, fury, and frankly power the likes of which this world has never seen before.

The first time I saw a transcript of these remarks, the phrase “best not” made me think it was a joke. You can tell when the guy threatening you is not accustomed to violence when he says something weird. It’s a sign he threatens people in his head more often than he threatens them out loud. But the marquee phrase in this statement is “the likes of which the world has never seen.” That’s the one that caught the attention of the press and, fortunately, rules out the possibility of a nuclear strike, since the world saw that on this date in 1945.

Still, it’s an understatement to say presidents have not historically spoken this way. North Korea routinely speaks this way about us, but that’s what makes them the world’s funniest non-nuclear nation. The joke stops working if they irradiate Guam. What we to do is keep the dynamic between the DPRK and the US like a kid taunting a pro wrestler, and not wade into the stands to beat him to death for saying we suck.

My understanding of the consensus on KJ-1 is that he is a rational actor. He makes weird moves, but they’re to satisfy the weird demands of running a nationwide cult of personality, not merely to make chaos. He does not actually want to fight a nuclear war. He would probably fight back in a nuclear war, though, and if he felt one was inevitable he might try to beat us to the punch. You want to interact with someone like that carefully, so it’s weird Trump decided to say something so inflammatory.

Today, however, we learn that he didn’t decide to say anything in particular. Although he had discussed the elements of a statement with White House staff, what he said yesterday was improvised. That’s cool. There’s no need to write out the entire speech you will say to avert nuclear war. Now if you’ll excuse me, I have to go to the dental supply store and buy several hundred lead aprons.

]]>http://combatblog.net/donald-trump-ad-libbed-threat-north-korea/feed/0Real news gets new anchor Kayleigh McEnanyhttp://combatblog.net/real-news-gets-new-anchor-kayleigh-mcenany/
http://combatblog.net/real-news-gets-new-anchor-kayleigh-mcenany/#respondTue, 08 Aug 2017 16:41:39 +0000http://combatblog.net/?p=10834I consider myself a strong speller, but my brain refuses to absorb the name “Kayleigh McEnany.” I blame the victim. “Kayleigh” is needlessly adorned—this is my son William, whom we call Billeigh—and “McEnany” is just a bunch of sounds, the Scots-Irish equivalent of “banana.” Maybe that’s the point. McEnany herself is a cipher, a pretty […]

I consider myself a strong speller, but my brain refuses to absorb the name “Kayleigh McEnany.” I blame the victim. “Kayleigh” is needlessly adorned—this is my son William, whom we call Billeigh—and “McEnany” is just a bunch of sounds, the Scots-Irish equivalent of “banana.” Maybe that’s the point. McEnany herself is a cipher, a pretty blonde template after the fashion of Fox News. She looks like the anchorwoman in a Paul Verhoeven movie. In this regard, she contrasts sharply with the previous anchor of the real news, Lara Trump, who looks like the realtor who tried to fuck your dad.

Thus we enter week two of the real news, “brought to you from Trump tower here in New York.” Like most Americans, I am sick of fake news such as the New York Times and long for news I can trust, ideally broadcast from a black tower owned by the person the news is about. Once again, the real news reports that Donald Trump is great. But it’s got a new, more professional face in McEnany, and it also seems to have better production values. There are wipes between cuts instead of momentum-killing fades to black, and there are inserts. Granted, the inserts play sound at low volume while McEnany talks, but we’re still looking at a leap forward in production values. Check it out:

McEnany’s appearance on the real news coincides with her appointment as spokeswoman for the Republican National Committee. Previously, she was a contributor to CNN and a producer for Mike Huckabee’s show on Fox News. Between the personnel change and the more professional look, it’s tempting to conclude that the RNC is producing the real news now, but it remains unclear who makes this show. It runs on Trump’s Facebook page, and it claims to shoot in Trump tower, so it makes sense that it would be a product of the Trump PR team. But this installment bears the RNC’s fingerprints, not just in staffing and production but in message.

“More great economic news on Friday,” McEnany says, following Walter Cronkite’s practice of telling viewers how wonderful world events have been. “Overall, since the president took office, President Trump has created more than one million jobs.” That sounds impressive, but we should not that there hasn’t been a six-month period since mid-2013 that didn’t see the creation of more than a million jobs. That factoid comes from this Washington Post analysis of recent messaging from the RNC, which described the million-jobs statistic as “unprecedented economic growth” in a tweet Sunday night. Two pro-Trump organizations could easily talk about the same recent economic data at the same time without working together. But McEnany’s new positions as RNC spokeswoman and real news anchor make it seem like more than coincidence.

If the RNC is involved in the production of these videos, it represents a pernicious shift in the party’s attitude. It was one thing to watch legions of Republicans change their tune on Trump after he won. It’s another to watch the GOP tacitly endorse the idea that actual news broadcasts are fake, and only propaganda is real. Say what you will about the disintegration of longstanding norms in American politics. Up until last week, both parties at least gave lip service to the distinction between journalism and politics. That’s over now for the GOP.

One presumes the Democrats will respond by producing their own, slightly less audacious “real news” program hosted by Mark Zuckerberg. I guess I should be numb by now, but it’s still unsettling to see naked propaganda from the president and his party billing itself as news. I feel as though we have violated some longstanding condition in the social contract, whereby we agreed to distinguish between fact and opinion. Probably we crossed that line long ago and have just gotten around to making videos about it. But this real news feels surreal, like a scene in a science fiction movie or some viral video from North Korean state television. It’s weird that making America great again involves making it awful in ways it never was before.

]]>http://combatblog.net/real-news-gets-new-anchor-kayleigh-mcenany/feed/0Combat! blog gets that paper, isn’t usefulhttp://combatblog.net/combat-blog-gets-paper-isnt-useful/
http://combatblog.net/combat-blog-gets-paper-isnt-useful/#respondMon, 07 Aug 2017 22:44:48 +0000http://combatblog.net/?p=10829Friends, you would not believe how many deadlines I made today. Did you know you can hire me to do difficult work on short notice in exchange for exorbitant amounts of money? It’s true, especially the exorbitant part. It’s worth it, though, to hire the kind of writer who doesn’t miss deadline. How do I […]

Friends, you would not believe how many deadlines I made today. Did you know you can hire me to do difficult work on short notice in exchange for exorbitant amounts of money? It’s true, especially the exorbitant part. It’s worth it, though, to hire the kind of writer who doesn’t miss deadline. How do I do it? Mostly by passing the savings on to you, the loyal Combat! blog reader, in the form of not posting. There is no blog today, because I have typed my fingers to the bone and cannot think anymore. While I immerse myself in the nonlinguistic world of fencing practice, how about you read this story about two real estate speculators who bought the street portion of one of San Francisco’s most expensive private streets? Tina Lam and Michael Cheng bought Presidio Terrace—home to multimillion-dollar mansions owned by congresspeople and other members of the ruling class—at auction for $90,000, after the homeowners association failed to pay a $14 annual tax for several years running. Now Lam and Cheng are they’re trying to decide what to do with it. Ideas include charging residents for parking or just selling the street back to them for a gajillion dollars. Given the broader socio-economic environment of San Francisco, I’m tempted to call this irony. It’s probably just late capitalism feeding on itself, though. Either way, it’s nice to see the commodification of land biting the investor class, for once. We’ll be back tomorrow with something more substantial.

]]>http://combatblog.net/combat-blog-gets-paper-isnt-useful/feed/0Friday links! Kulturkampf editionhttp://combatblog.net/friday-links-kulturkampf-edition/
http://combatblog.net/friday-links-kulturkampf-edition/#respondFri, 04 Aug 2017 22:02:10 +0000http://combatblog.net/?p=10825One of the most reliable depressants of the past nine months has been thinking about the kind of system Donald Trump rises to the top of. What sort of milk do we swim in, if he is the cream? The ready explanations are that America is a nation of morons, hucksters or, most alarmingly, both. […]

One of the most reliable depressants of the past nine months has been thinking about the kind of system Donald Trump rises to the top of. What sort of milk do we swim in, if he is the cream? The ready explanations are that America is a nation of morons, hucksters or, most alarmingly, both. It’s scary to consider. The fear we are talking about here is fear of culture. Conservatives have conspired with centrist newspaper columnist to make “culture war” the call of the nincompoop, but we do care where our culture goes, don’t we? There must be ways to make it better, such as reading, and probably ways to make it worse, such as stepsibling-themed pornography. Today is Friday, and kulturkampf is raging whether we enlist or not. Won’t you take a picnic basket up the hill with me?

First, the good news: President Trump said that building a wall along the Mexican border is “the least important thing we are talking about.” The bad news is he said so to Mexican president Peña Nieto while begging him to shut up about not paying for it. In leaked transcripts of his early diplomatic calls, Trump seems not to practice the art of the deal so much as beg for favors. He urges Nieto to stop publicly denying that Mexico will pay for the wall, even though one day earlier he tweeted that they would. “Just go along with my lie because it isn’t important” is not the message I want my president to bring to world leaders.

What is it about people who grew up rich that makes them such aggressive negotiators? It’s almost as though Trump owed his reputation not to his sense of deals but to his sense of entitlement. In their blithe disdain for other people’s opinions, his transcribed speech sounds like dialogue for Lucille Bluth. This is not my idea. Some genius at Buzzfeed superimposed quotes from Trump’s calls on images from Arrested Development. It is perfect

And I just threw up. I don’t know what’s wrong with me, but typing is over. Sorry guys! I have to go throw up again.

]]>http://combatblog.net/friday-links-kulturkampf-edition/feed/0Even after hot mic snafu, PSC regulates solar out of businesshttp://combatblog.net/even-hot-mic-snafu-montana-psc-puts-solar-business/
http://combatblog.net/even-hot-mic-snafu-montana-psc-puts-solar-business/#respondThu, 03 Aug 2017 19:12:33 +0000http://combatblog.net/?p=10821Let’s say you run a state regulatory agency tasked with setting rates and contracts for utility companies, such as the Montana Public Service Commission. Let us also say part of your mandate is to promote renewable energy. This isn’t just your general sense of what the public wants you do to; it’s federal law, mandated […]

I’ve been thinking about this joke for 20 years, and it’s the word “yearned.”

Let’s say you run a state regulatory agency tasked with setting rates and contracts for utility companies, such as the Montana Public Service Commission. Let us also say part of your mandate is to promote renewable energy. This isn’t just your general sense of what the public wants you do to; it’s federal law, mandated by the Public Utility Regulatory Policies Act of 1978. Anyway, let’s say that despite this mandate, you secretly plan to use your regulatory power to increase profits for established utility companies and keep stuff like solar power out of the market. People have accused you of pursing this agenda before, but you denied it. Then, a hot mic accidentally records you talking about how to set rates so low it puts solar farms out of business.

You cannot go ahead and do it, right? You got caught planning to do something deeply unethical and federally illegal, and the only thing to do now is abort the plan. You certainly cannot set rates for solar farms so far below market that they cease to be viable businesses. People are on to you. And yet Commissioner Bob Lake did exactly that. In June, a hot mic caught him talking to rate analyst Neil Templeton about the threat of solar power. Templeton opines that “just dropping the rate probably took care of the whole thing.” Lake replies, “Well, the 10-year might do it if the price doesn’t. And at this low price, I can’t imagine anyone getting into it.”

That’s it! You made a recording of your criminal conspiracy, and now it is over. Yet somehow, last month, the PSC set the rates for the proposed MTSUN solar farm outside Billings at $20 per megawatt-hour over a ten-year contract. Compare to the residential supply rate the commission set for NorthWestern Energy: $62 per megawatt-hour over the next 25 years. MTSUN developer Mark Klein confirmed that his solar project would be unworkable under those terms.

I applaud this bold act of regulatory capture and welcome the PSC to our long war against the sun. My only concern is that it will come up again somehow. Still, I praise Lake and his colleagues for sheer brazenness. Montana ratepayers could have no stauncher ally in the fight against cheap electricity from dubious sources. You can read all about it in this week’s column for the Missoula Independent. We’ll be back tomorrow with Friday links!